The real-life love that inspired the ‘Before Trilogy’
Richard Linklater’s Before Trilogy is one of the best pieces of romantic cinema ever made. After a chance encounter on a train, Jesse and Celine, played heartwarmingly by Ethan Hawke and Julie Delpy, decide to deboard and spend a night together walking around Vienna. It’s the start of a decade-spanning love story of missed connections and reconnections as Linklater drops in on these characters in 1995, 2004 and finally in 2013. As he traces them through decades of their lives, he couldn’t let them go—perhaps because he couldn’t let go of the inspiration behind it.
The most beautiful thing about the trilogy is the overwhelming lack of plot. Any kind of hardship or hurdles the couple faces happens off-camera in between the time jumps of the movies. Instead, on screen, it is largely just conversation. Especially in the first two, Before Sunrise and Before Sunset, the couple simply walk around, meandering through conversations and streets. They cover all sorts, from spirituality to family, love and heartbreak, everything. It’s a perfect depiction of an ideal date where one topic flows freely into the next, as the captivating chemistry between these two characters makes them one of the best on-screen couples in cinema history.
However, Linklater’s tenderness towards these characters and the simplicity of their love story comes down to a vested personal interest. He’s precious about their story because, really, it’s his.
In 1989, the director was in Philadelphia and happened to stop at a toy shop. Similar to the random, chance encounter between Jesse and Celine, who happen to sit opposite one another on a train, Linklater met a woman called Amy Lehrhaupt. Only in town, briefly, to visit family, similar to his characters’ fleeting stop in Vienna, the real-life duo walked around the city talking.
“We ended up spending the night walking around, flirting, doing things you would never do now. I was at that stage in life where I was open, so we just walked and got to know each other,” the director said, as the inspiration for the movie came directly from this romantic night.
However, while Jesse and Celine don’t swap contact details, instead hatching, and then failing, a plan to meet again in six months, Linklater and Lehrhaupt did. They tried what the director called “that long-distance thing”, but it failed, and they lost touch.
This is where it becomes meta. At the start of Before Sunset, Jesse is in Paris promoting a book he wrote about that night with Celine and undeniably secretly hoping she will show—and she does. She reveals that at some point, she’d heard a friend talking about the book and had put two and two together when she heard the plot, realising it was about her and written by her lost connection.
That was probably Linklater’s dream scenario. Having written Before Sunrise after their chance meeting and then losing touch, there seems to be a part to the story in which the director was hoping that maybe the film would bring them back, that maybe, like in his sequel, she would hear about it and contact him again. One of her friends did, right around the time Linklater had begun working on the second movie and the plot of Jesse’s book. Once again, life mirrored that moment as Lehrhaupt’s friend figured it all out and got in contact, but this time, only to break his heart.
Lehrhaupt had tragically passed away in a motorcycle crash in 1994, at only the age of 24, mere weeks before Linklater began shooting Before Sunrise, the film he hoped would find her. He didn’t learn about this for several years, though, once again writing his dream scenario as he returned to Jesse and Celine in the sequel and allowed them to recreate and live on in a way his love now never could. He had Celine show up at a reading because Lehrhaupt could never have appeared at one of his screenings, remaining a lost dream of a reality unrealised.
